Typographic CSS Audit

Has spec but not consistently implemented

This is a prioritized list of CSS modules that have been specced but are not implemented consistently across browsers.

CSS Unit division
- This isn’t explicitly a typographic feature, but this is a big step towards enabling fluid variable font settings and font animations on resize. An incremental step towards my initial proposal.
- Lea Verou discusses the need for this in her recent talk.
Text-wrap: balance
- The NYTimes has a popular text balancer. At Vox Media we inserted non-breaking spaces at the end of headlines to avoid egregiously unbalanced text. Having this built into browsers would make headlines look much better across the web.
Text-justify*
- I suggest adding a flexbox-style part to this spec where one can control how much word spacing, letter spacing, and font stretch go into the algorithm.
- Issue on GitHub
Hyphens*
- Currently this is English only and requires a prefix.
CSS Line Grid
- Baseline grids in CSS are helpful to keep text across multiple columns cleanly aligned.
- Note this issue with the headline examples in the spec.
Initial Letters
Leading/trailing trim
- Helpful to align the first or last line of text with the container or other content on the page.

*text-justify and hyphens are blocking text-align: justify from being acceptable to use.

-webkit-background-clip: implemented in all major browsers but doesn’t have a spec. Webkit’s blog post on background-clip: text.
-webkit-text-stroke: implemented in all major browsers but doesn’t have an official spec. The -webkit-text-stroke compatibility standard can be found here.
- When codifying into an official spec, please note the issues with outline overlaps that are common in variable fonts.